Factors influencing attitudes of workers in the work from home environment in South African Organisations

Factors influencing attitudes of workers in the work from home environment in South African Organisations

Harare, Zimbabwe and Virtual

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, a plethora of articles published discuss the work from home (WFH) concept. Like in other sectors of industry, the model received much attention in the academic fraternity as millions of employees had to involuntarily employ the model during global lockdown restrictions. For some, the WFH model worked well, and yet it presented different sorts of challenges for others. While corpus literature has examined the WFH effects, limitations, opportunities, technicalities, logistics, inter-alia, there is a gap in explicating the factors influencing different employee attitudes in the WFH environment in South African organisations. As such, the objective of this study was to determine the factors influencing these differing attitudes. Following an interpretivist philosophy and exploratory approach, all based on induction, some key findings include the identification of eight factors that influence workers’ attitudes towards WFH. These are: age, seniority and position, managing a team vis-a-vis being in a team, having a family, being career orientated versus work life balance orientated, type of work, type of organisation, and distance form work.